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Luxe Populi

Luxury for the masses’ — the crusade that got under way in the late ’80s — implied that schoolteachers and cab drivers, having been denied Birkin bags and 911 Turbo convertibles for all of recorded history, were finally coming into their natural birthright. “Affordable luxury” would bring life’s finer things within reach and spread them around. Luxury brands began a precarious balancing act, continuing to bask in their exclusivity while opening the gates to a whole new breed of customer by introducing “entry-level” products at “accessible” prices. Poor Holly Golightly, stuck in the ’60s, munching her breakfast in front of Tiffany’s windows, hankering after the diamonds on display. If she were around today, she could go in and buy herself a piece of the brand: say, a $125 sterling-silver key ring.

The landscape of our everyday lives is now strewn with luxury products, both real and fake, and the by now extensive literature on the luxury-goods industry effectively documents not only the trajectory of the brands themselves, from illustrious history to ubiquitous logos, but also the course of our experience as consumers, from fantasy and yearning to rampant obsession to the early warning signs of disillusionment. “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster” (The Penguin Press), by Dana Thomas, recaps recent history, much of it familiar to industry spectators, and assesses the outcome, with particular attention to unintended, not-so-glamorous consequences, like call girls who insist on being paid in Gucci shoes or the booming counterfeit industry, whose profits fund drug trafficking and terrorism.

A journalist based in Paris, Thomas has been covering the luxury boom since its onset. She writes with authority, and she knows the players, many of whom appear in interviews throughout her book. While their personal philosophies may differ, Bernard Arnault, the C.E.O. of LVMH, who is widely credited with ushering in this new era of luxury’s democratization, seems to speak for them all when he says that to be successful, a luxury product line must fulfill a fantasy: “It is so new and unique you want to buy it,” he explains. “You feel as if you must buy it, in fact, or else you won’t be in the moment. You will be left behind.”

Unlike many of the authors on this crowded shelf, presumed experts whose intramural tone is aimed directly at executives looking to market their products more successfully, Thomas talks directly to the shopper — the teenager at the mall, the tourist in Vegas. Some information, considered common knowledge within the industry, will come as a surprise to consumers whose primary sources of product information

are ads and fashion magazines. The fact that the average markup on a luxury handbag is 10 to 12 times the cost of production — 13 times at Louis Vuitton — probably won’t deter most fashion addicts on a beeline to the cash register, but it might at least make them more aware of just how brazen the terms of the equation have become, now that it’s the fantasy that’s the commodity.

The going rate is, of course, whatever the market will bear. The price is necessarily inflated to cover the costs of producing the fantasy — the runway extravaganza, the print campaign featuring supermodels shot by some celebrity photographer, the barrage of ads in the pages of magazines and newspapers — which are far in excess of what it costs to make the product. In the end, Thomas concludes that Arnault’s marketing strategy — shifting attention away from the product itself and focusing instead on what the product represents — has succeeded. So well, in fact, that it no longer matters to many consumers whether the product is real or fake: both stand for the same thing.

If counterfeiters don’t have to subsidize the overhead of a marketing department, it’s because they don’t need one: the luxury brands have already done the marketing for them.

Thomas’s contention — implicit in the title, stated in Chapter 1 — is that luxury’s democratization has been its demise. And maybe ours, too, though she stops short of saying so. “The luxury industry has changed the way people dress,” she writes. “It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact with others. It has become part of our social fabric. To achieve this, it has sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers. In order to make luxury ‘accessible,’ tycoons have stripped away all that has made it special. Luxury has lost its luster.”

Whether or not all luxury brands are guilty as charged, the secrecy surrounding these companies and their practices puts Thomas at a disadvantage. She turns up evidence of the cheese paring she claims is now pervasive in the industry, and though it comes down to only a handful of examples, they support her broader allegations that luxury brands as public corporations have come under increasing pressure to generate bigger margins and reward shareholders with higher returns. In one instance Thomas cites, a company decides to cut sleeves half an inch shorter:

“When you get to 1,000, you see the savings,” according to her source, who, like the brand, remains nameless.

Photo

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Coolife

Thomas is at her best as a reporter, accompanying police in Guangzhou, China, on raids to bust the manufacturers and sellers of counterfeit goods. There is real drama in these scenes, and vivid characters, including tough-talking cops and rock-tossing child laborers angry that their work has been disrupted. The investigation continues in Lower Manhattan, where the unlikely culprits are enterprising small-town housewives who travel to Canal Street and bring home cartons of fakes for resale, at a profit, at neighborhood “purse parties,” some of them to benefit their local church. In one survey, Thomas tells us, roughly a third of the respondents claimed to see no crime in buying counterfeit goods, and indeed shoppers caught buying them routinely resort to playing dumb as their defense. “We’ll go on raids in Chinatown wholesalers and we’ll find five or six suburban women standing there — customers,” one New York detective tells Thomas. “We’ll say to these women, ‘The dealers take you down dark corridors, through locked doors. The police say, “Open up!” The lights are turned out and everyone is told to be quiet. At what point did you realize that something was amiss here?’ ”

Affluentials, affluenza, technoluxe, populuxe, opuluxe — the wordsmiths have been working overtime to find names for all the changes that have come about ever since luxury infiltrated our psyches. James B. Twitchell, the author of several books on advertising, registered the fallout in 2002, with “Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury” (Columbia University Press), still among the best of the many attempts to assess luxury’s cultural impact. “This is a revolution not of necessities but of wants,” he writes. And: “Many of us all over the world are becoming part of what, for lack of a better phrase, is a mass class of upscale consumption. We understand each other not by sharing religion, politics or ideas. We share branded things. We speak the Esperanto of advertising, luxe populi.” Formerly the prerogative of the rich, luxury goods have become the reward that members of the middle class bestow on themselves for working hard. The sole remaining criterion for ownership is whether the buyer can afford it.

“He who dies with the most toys wins” — that was the gloating slogan on a bumper sticker back in the ’80s. In a country that bills itself as the land of opportunity, in a society that quantifies success in material terms, the act of amassing things is considered nothing less than patriotic. George W. Bush’s advice to the American people after 9/11 was to go out and buy stuff. Prosperity is a badge to be worn with pride; shopping is recreation.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, in Twitchell’s opinion. He even understands that throwing money around can be a thrill. “Spending for many is power, intoxication, conquest, even sexual,” he acknowledges. Still, he is compelled to echo one psychologist’s observation that “the rise of consumer culture parallels the rise of two newly recognized psychological ‘disorders’: narcissism and borderline personality.” And he can’t help wondering whether the concept of luxury today isn’t oxymoronic: “If everyone can have it, is it still luxury?” he asks.

Even the word itself — overused and tired — is debased. Must there be a luxury version of every single product? This summer, an e-mail from an online retailer notified me of a “Special Sale on Luxury Pool Floats!” evidently targeting folks for whom ordinary pool floats just aren’t good enough. What’s the difference?

As a friend remarked, “Whenever I see the word ‘luxury’ now, I just substitute ‘expensive.’ ”

Though luxury has had its detractors all along, the notion that faster cars and pricier handbags don’t bring contentment finds an especially articulate champion in Robert H. Frank. His “Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess” (Princeton University Press) remains as relevant and provocative as when it first appeared in 1999.

Americans have been spending more and saving less. As a result, Frank contends, “all of us — rich and poor alike, but especially the rich — are spending more time at the office and taking shorter vacations; we are spending less time with our families and friends; and we have less time for sleep, exercise, travel, reading and other activities that help maintain body and soul.” Frank’s argument is bolstered by a detailed examination of “the relationship between consumption and human well-being,” and anyone who has ever suffered buyer’s remorse can appreciate his assessment of the brief burst of endorphins that shopping brings. “Although it is clear that most people experience a rush of satisfaction when they first acquire TV sets with bigger screens, refrigerators with greater capacity or loudspeakers with greater dynamic range, these feelings almost invariably decay rapidly,” he writes. By contrast, “our subjective experience of vigorous exercise or of learning to play a musical instrument may even be mildly aversive at first, but will gradually become pleasurable, and ever more so as additional time passes. To the extent that we ignore our tendencies to adapt differently in different spheres, we will spend too much on conspicuous consumption, and too little on inconspicuous consumption.”

The ranks of the disaffected have been steadily growing. Frank notes the emergence of a new back-to-basics movement and a number of best-selling books that have inspired it, beginning with Duane Elgin’s “Voluntary Simplicity,” in 1981. The day after Thanksgiving has been designated Buy Nothing Day, an anti-consumerist holiday, since 1992. Three years ago in the San Francisco Bay area, a group of friends vowed not to buy anything new except underwear, food and health and safety items; they called themselves the Compact, after the Mayflower Pilgrims’ covenant. According to recent estimates, more than 300 people worldwide took the pledge for 2007.

The characters Dana Thomas appoints the heroes in her book are not the cops, for all their tenacity and daring, but the “Luxury Refugees,” as she calls them: “designers, perfumers and executives who grew so disillusioned with the compromises and greed of the luxury corporate world that they fled and started something small and independent that would allow them to do what drew them to the business in the first place: create the best that money could buy.” One high-profile example: Tom Ford, who, since his departure from Gucci, has gone on to launch a men’s-wear business that is more expensive and more exclusive. But Thomas’s refugees are not to be confused with the dropouts who are swearing off shopping, and in the end their dissent is not so much a protest as a scramble for higher ground.\